Self-Organization Works If You Let It.

Teams cannot be assembled like Lego bricks.

I spend much of my time working with agile teams.  A big challenge is often these people are thrown together and forced to behave as a “team.”  The self-organizing team is one of the most critical pieces of an agile project, and it is one of the hardest things to create.  I wanted to spend some time discussing why building teams is so difficult.

In most business environments, a team is formed by hiring consultants and putting them together with existing employees.  The team is broken up, and the consultants are laid off or moved to a different project when work is complete.  The approach from an accounting perspective might make sense, but it creates plenty of unnecessary work.  Teams are continually going through Tuckman’s stages of group development and are in the “storming” stage of team maturity.  In a more agile environment, work comes to teams, and then the teams do the job.  The group moves on to a different project when they finish work.

According to the Harvard Business review teams which stick together have a 19% decrease in defects and 30% decrease in budget deviations.  The bottom line is that spinning up units and disbanding them is a foolish use of company money.  So what makes the team self-organizing?  Yvette Francino has an excellent blog on the subject.  In short, teams which self-organize have a few properties:

1. They hold themselves accountable for success and failure.
2. They healthily handle conflict.
3. They have a common goal which they strive to achieve.
4. They have a standard way of working.
5. Finally, they have stable membership.

These traits make an excellent self-organizing team, and it is up to agile coaches and scrum masters to hold them accountable.  Notice that these requirements do not mention test-driven development, SOLID Development, or other technical paradigms.  Most of these skills are soft skills.  It means that a team needs to learn how to work together outside of the technical skills, and this is difficult.  People have egos and subtle hierarchies of expertise and authority.  Add to the mix unrealistic deadline pressure and micromanagement from outside leadership, and you corrupt the five characteristics of self-organization.

So look toward creating more functional teams and allow upper management to understand how they are more successful.

Until next time.